Job Offer from September 25, 2026
Max Planck Research Group “Machine Visual Culture: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing”
Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome
The Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History invites applications for postdoctoral research fellowships in digital and computational art history within the Max Planck Research Group “Machine Visual Culture: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing,” led by Dr Leonardo Impett.
The group investigates the reciprocal relationship between artificial intelligence and visual culture. It combines digital and computational art history, critical AI studies, and the history of art and visual culture to study both AI as a cultural phenomenon and computational methods as tools for new historical research.
These fellowships are intended for researchers who wish to develop their work as part of a collaborative research group. Successful candidates will work closely with Dr Leonardo Impett and the Machine Visual Culture group, and will be expected to contribute actively to the group’s shared research agenda. Applications should therefore explain not only theapplicant’s own research profile, but also how they would contribute to one of the following three projects.
Projects
This project uses distant reading, NLP, citation analysis, and other computational methods to study the intellectual and institutional histories of art history. Relevant materials may include art-historical writing, historiography, theory, criticism, catalogues, periodicals, archives, correspondence, bibliographies, and other corpora through which the discipline has defined its objects, methods, and concepts.
Fellows may work with large-scale published and archival corpora, including online journals and periodicals, bibliographic datasets, and the digitised holdings of the Bibliotheca Hertziana. In particular, the group can offer access, where appropriate, to digitised non-public holdings of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, including rare books and contemporary books relating to the art history of Rome and Naples. These collections are a distinctive strength of the institute and may support computational approaches to the history of art history.
This project develops AI-based, cross-, inter-, and multimodal approaches to art history and visual culture. It is concerned with how images, texts, metadata, archives, and other media can be related, compared, aligned, and interpreted through computational methods.
The group is a main partner in the International Max Planck Research School for Multimodal Digital Humanities (IMPRS-MDH), and fellows may work alongside doctoral researchers in that programme. The group is also involved in several international projects relating to multimodality, intermedial criticism, and multimodal AI. We especially welcome projects that combine historical, theoretical, and computational approaches to image-text relations, intermediality, vector-space methods, or multimodal models.
This project is a new research strand within the group, concerned with developing computational approaches to the history of labour, ecology, and visual culture. We are especially interested in projects that combine ecological or environmental data with AI, distant viewing, computer vision, geospatial methods, or other computational approaches.
Projects might address, for instance, environmental imaginaries, landscape, extraction, climate, collections, or theways computational methods can make visible relations between images, environments, and power.
Research Environment
Fellows will be expected to contribute to the intellectual and practical life of the group, including seminars, reading groups, workshops, shared methods development, and collaborative research outputs. Each fellow will normally be expected to lead one major collaborative publication during the fellowship. Depending on the project, fellows may also contribute to datasets, tools, research infrastructure, or future grant applications.
The group offers excellent computing facilities, methodological training, considerable computational resources, and the support of a full-time engineer/research scientist. This support is intended to enable ambitious research, not to replacethe fellow’s own technical engagement. We are open to candidates from art history, visual culture, archaeology, and related fields who have some exposure to digital methods, as well as to candidates with stronger computational backgrounds. Applicants should, however, be able to implement, test, and critically evaluate computational methods with a degree of independence appropriate to their career stage and project.
Eligibility and Terms
Applicants must have submitted their PhD by the start date of the fellowship, though exceptional cases may be considered. The fellowships are postdoctoral positions; a separate call for predoctoral fellows will be advertised separately.
Fellowships are available for twelve months and may be renewed once, subject to approval and available funding. Fellowships may begin between January and September 2027. Fellows must be able to reside in Rome for the duration of the appointment and participate actively in the research life of the group and institute.
All positions offer internationally competitive remuneration and excellent working conditions at the Bibliotheca Hertziana inRome.
Application Documents
Applications should be submitted in English and should include:
- Cover letter, 1 page
- Curriculum vitae, 2 pages
- Research proposal, including timeline and explanation of fit with one of the three projects, max. 1,000 words, not including bibliography
- Sample of work or sample publication, max. 2,000 words
- Two letters of reference
Deadline and Submission
Applications should be submitted by 19 October 2026 via the Bibliotheca Hertziana application portal.https://recruitment.biblhertz.it
Equality and Diversity
The Max Planck Society is committed to fostering gender equality and diversity. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds. The Max Planck Society also seeks to increase the representation of individuals with disabilities in its workforce and particularly encourages applications from candidates with disabilities.